Last week’s news that no sanctions would be brought against Bradley Wiggins, Team Sky and British Cycling for their part in the jiffy bag saga may have led Team Sky to blithely proclaim that no wrongdoing had been carried out, but the unsatisfactory nature of UK Anti-Doping’s incomplete investigation painted a worrying picture for the anti-doping landscape.
UKAD's 14-month inquiry exposed a near-toothless authority with a limited budget, stretched resources and no powers to compel testimony. It is little wonder, then, that faith in the anti-doping world continues to erode at an alarming rate.
Yet the Wiggins affair is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, as one anti-doping expert put it.
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“My take on the fundamental challenge that they have is that UKAD need twice the funding, if not more,” says Andy Parkinson, who was the Chief Executive of the organisation until January 2015.
“The biggest argument for additional funding is that the landscape has changed dramatically since UKAD was set up. Cases are more complicated and it’s a different environment, which requires different investment.”
On the face of it, UKAD’s investigation wasn’t complicated at all. Or at least it shouldn’t have been. A man, in this case Simon Cope, traveled from A to B with a package that was handed to a doctor, who then administered the contents to an athlete – in this case the doctor was Richard Freeman, the athlete Bradley Wiggins – with the treatment taking place at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011.
It sounds simple but, despite the length of the investigation, we are no closer to finding out what was in the couriered container. Sky manager Dave Brailsford, despite a narrative of someone obsessed with attention to detail, wasn’t initially able to provide this crucial fact, but he later claimed that Freeman told him the package contained a legal decongestant. While it’s bizarre to the point of inexplicable as to why a drug available at local European pharmacies needed to be transported from Manchester to the French Alps, the fact that Team Sky could not produce evidence to back up their notion of no-wrongdoing raised genuine questions about them, their lack of medical records, and their self-proclaimed status as a ‘clean team'.
- Timeline of UKAD investigation into Team Sky and British Cycling
- No doping charges for Wiggins, Team Sky and British Cycling over mystery package
- Bradley Wiggins: UKAD investigation felt like a witch hunt
- UKAD launch damning attack on Team Sky and British Cycling over medical practices
The TUE grey area
Clouds hang over Team Sky and Wiggins
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